Internet Girl - a South African Indie-Pop Band for the Internet Age

In a year like 2020, we’ve all been seeking some sort of escape - considering our daily confinement to our houses – and music streaming numbers globally show that music has definitely been a primary outlet for all of us. If you’re like me, you may have spent hours scrolling through playlists hoping to find another song or album that can salvage this very chaotic year. For me, that song was “Die in L.A” by the trio Internet Girl. Luckily, that song was not the only song in their catalog, because this band was churning out single after single throughout 2020, and each equally as charming and buzzing with indie-pop energy as the last. 

This group is quickly becoming one to watch as they have rapidly grown from a small listenership to having 100 000 monthly listens, and this has been under the guidance of Bedroom Collective’s Andrei Iacoban, whose “independent music outlet” has been working to cultivate young and promising talent like our new favorite trio: Tk, Neese, and Griggs. 

As I have been growing into a loyal Internet Girl stan, the only thing that kept coming to my mind as I added them to all of my personal playlists and berated my friends to do the same, is how I have never heard anything like them in South Africa. With SA radio and top ten charts brimming with hip hop, pop, the Yanos, and other genres that truly speak to the South African landscape, the younger generations whose taste has been molded by the internet age seemed uncatered for. In a time where what songs a Gen Z-er will listen to is determined by just how many times it will be used as a sound on their “for you page”, Internet Girl has arrived on the scene cementing that they too, a group from different parts of South Africa, are more than capable of becoming your new favorite indie-pop band. 

I got the chance to interview Neese about the band’s beginnings, and what their experience has been so far. 

[UNPUBLISHED:]  How did your group come together and how has it been working as a band? 

[NEESE:] Tk and I were actually a group before Internet Girl. We made trap music, I would produce and Tk would do the rapping. That’s how we started working together, and then over time we kinda just got bored of that and decided to start Internet Girl. So originally it was just us two, and then while we were working on our first Soundcloud project, Griggs hits us up on Instagram and told us that he really liked what we were doing, and we said, “Yeah, send through some stems”. We sent him something unreleased and he laid some stuff on it and we loved it. It worked with our stuff so well, so we said, “Yeah bro, pull up to Pretoria for a while”. He flew down and it was a lot of fun, and we got on really quickly and we worked together really well. 

[UNPUBLISHED:] Being one of the few bands in SA whose sound caters to the TikTok and internet age (so to speak), how has it been trying to break into the industry?

[NEESE:] I wouldn’t say that our sound caters to TikTok specifically, I guess it can because any music can cater to TikTok these days, but definitely the internet age. I think we’ve taken a different route as to how most South African bands try and get big. We’ve kind of skipped the local scene and tried to go overseas immediately. It’s been good, I mean I didn’t expect so much success especially in the US, our main fan base is in the US, and it’s been really cool. Our Sound is really focused, our sound is very intentional and our influences come from all over the place. 

[UNPUBLISHED:]  In your 2020 Spotify wrapped it showed that you had 2 million streams, and you’ve been featured on a number of playlists like Fresh Finds, which is no small feat. How has it felt to garner this recognition?

[NEESE:] The playlisting recognition has been crazy, I’m so happy about it. If Spotify is recognizing you and putting you on playlists like Lorem and Fresh Finds, then you know that you’re doing something right. It’s really helped with the streams, gain some fans, get the Jimi Somewhere feature. Every artists’ goal should be to get on playlists, it’s such a big help. With “Next Summer” getting on Lorem and Fresh Finds, that’s how we got signed, that’s how the label found us, so it helped a lot and kind of made our career. 

[UNPUBLISHED:] 2020 has been really strange and I can only imagine how it has impacted your creative processes and the music you’ve produced. What has your experience been in this regard? 

[NEESE:]  2020 and the whole COVID thing didn’t really affect our workflow at all. We all live in different cities, so we’ve always worked over email. Whenever James comes, we work in the studio for a few weeks but other than that we work online so it really hasn’t been that bad. It’s actually helped us quite a bit, I think we had more time to just sit down, work on our music, and perfect our sound. 

[UNPUBLISHED:] And the question on many of our minds: why Internet Girl? 

[NEESE:]  We don’t answer the why internet girl question.

This very unpredictable year has given us a group that we will surely never forget, but other than that, as Neese aptly stated “everything else has been shit”. If you haven’t already added them to your library, take a look at their influences to convince you: Jean Dawson, BENEE, Mk.gee, Beabadoobee, and even some hyperpop and PC music artists like P4ker. With wide-ranging influences and the seamless integration of these sounds in their current singles, their upcoming project is something I am definitely looking forward to, and I am excited to see what 2021 holds for this elusively named trio.